Goodbye “Welcome Culture”? Part I

The following think-piece by an active participant in the European public discussion on immigration policy, written well before the European parliamentary elections of May 29, 2019, is understood as a contribution to the European and international political debate and not (so much) as a “pure” scholarly article. It begins with a stark prognosis: the earthquake-like outcome of these elections will strengthen the far-right political parties all over Europe, dramatically weakening the European center and left, and breaking down the “welcome culture” initiated by German chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous statement of late summer 2015—”We can do this” (“Wir schaffen das”)—which signaled a temporary and short-lived “air superiority” for multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and the welcoming of masses of refugees from the Middle East and North. One of the main reasons for the predictable decline of the Left on the European continent is, in my opinion, its inability to find credible solutions to the problems of immigration and integration.

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Now Available! Carl Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts

New from Telos Press: The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, by Carl Schmitt. Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, and with a preface by David Pan. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.

Written during the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, and the Cold War, this collection of occasional pieces provides an instructive look at the ways in which Carl Schmitt employed his theories in order to make judgments about contemporary historical events and problems. Covering topics such as the political significance of universalism and jurisprudence, the meaning of the partisan, the world-historical significance of the Cold War, the deterioration of metaphysics into “values,” the relationship between theoretical concepts and concrete historical situations, and his views on thinkers such as Machiavelli, Bodin, and Rousseau, these essays establish a revealing counterpoint to his more formal work. They react on the one hand directly to contemporary political questions and demonstrate the way in which he saw the immediate historical significance of his ideas. On the other hand, he also feels free to provide in these pieces the kinds of methodological reflections that help us to better understand the particular epistemological framework that makes his thought so unique.

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After Trump's Iran Decision: Is the West Going to Split?

Matthias Küntzel’s book Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold is available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout. Also available in Kindle format from Amazon.com.

On May 8, 2018, when U.S. President Donald Trump spoke to the press to make the case for the U.S. decision to leave the nuclear deal with Iran, he stated: “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail.” With this sentence, Trump initiated a new phase to diplomacy with Iran. Up to this point, nuclear blackmail, the threat that Iran would otherwise build a bomb, had defined and shaped the dynamic of negotiations. This worst case hung like a sword of Damocles over the actors. In order to avert it and in order to secure the nuclear deal, Obama refused to support the Iranian protest movement in 2009, just as in 2013 he refused to make good on the red line he had drawn in the Syrian war.

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Now Available! Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism

New from Telos Press: Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism, edited by Kai Evers and David Pan. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.

With contributions by Étienne Balibar, Annette Becker, Russell Berman, Jörn Leonhard, among many others, Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism focuses within Europe on the conflicts between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as a universalist political project and globally on the conflicts between European imperial politics and universal ideals. This collection of essays probes how these conflicts defined the war as the transition point to a new structure of global relations and postcolonial understandings of cultural identity. The volume’s first part considers the history of European universalism and how it affected the lead-up to the war. The second part analyzes how universalist goals affected the conduct of the war itself. While August 1914 marked a simultaneous turning point in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the war ended without such global synchronicity. Instead, it gave way to a wide variety of new spaces and chronologies of violence on a global level. Part three offers case studies of how representations of the war affected its remembrance and the way such war stories subverted or fit into different national narratives. The contributions in part four investigate different ways in which the experience of war and mass violence affected national cultures and notions of universalism in the United States and within Europe.

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Save Europe: Is the Present EU Institutional Arrangement Fit for Europe?

Among the discouraging quandaries that the European Union has had to face in recent years, no one could have imagined that the United Kingdom and the United States, our historical, crucial allies, would turn their back on the EU, thus leaving it exposed to the global influence to Russia, Turkey, and Iran, not exactly friends of our open societies and polity. It would have been equally impossible to predict that so many supposedly enlightened, tolerant, and democratic European citizens would rally around xenophobic and anti-Semitic political parties while reviving the most obtuse and primitive ethnocentrism. All these ills, and most of all of Brexit and its aftermath, were interpreted by many as a fatal blow to the EU, in combination with other indicators that seemed to point to a general design failure of its unifying project. Nevertheless, many reliable commentators have expressed faith that the EU, at long last, would react to this long-standing issue.

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Better Than a Victory or Worse Than a Defeat?

At the root of what is now happening in Catalonia there are various diagnostic errors. Those who wish to manage the issue as that of legality and public order are radically mistaken in their failure to see in it an eminently political problem, requiring all the imaginative force of political reason. The mere guardians of legality are unaware either of such creativity or of the diplomatic acumen called for in especially complex conflicts. Technocratic management is impotent there, where what is at stake is identity itself with its acute affective dimension, the emotion saturating one’s belonging or non-belonging to a group. Therefore, the source of the current crisis surpasses its historical and geographical context and goes to the conflation of the political and the nonpolitical, which may be unnoticed in periods of “normalcy,” though not in exceptional, dangerous and decisive situations.

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